


Gospel Truth

by Cerberuss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, M/M, Season/Series 02, Supernatural Reverse Big Bang Challenge 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:34:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27540871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerberuss/pseuds/Cerberuss
Summary: ‘DOES YOUR BROTHER KNOW THAT YOU WANT HIM?’Individually placed letters, bold and tinged brown with the weather. Sam can’t look away and he prays,dream dream dream.This sort of introspection could have come from no one but himself. His secret, his affliction, on display as a reminder. He put this here. Don’t forget, Sam, you’re abhorrent. This is all you.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Comments: 39
Kudos: 263





	Gospel Truth

  
  
\---

A metal plaque reflecting the blinding summer sun tells them that they are standing at the peak of the country’s smallest mountain. Last recorded in 1990, and listed under a litany of popups on topamericansights.com. 

Staffield, Nebraska, smells distinctly of freshly pressed canola, rich and sticky in a way that is hard to scrub from the senses. From the top of the ‘mountain’ Sam can see the town in its entirety; all of one main street, houses and trailers dotted along back roads. There’s no school, no library, and no reason to stay. A cluster town for local farmers, a church, a post office, a police station, and a barbeque chicken shop with two-for-one deal all seven days of the week. 

The slightly larger than average hill is easily the most interesting destination for miles in every direction. Dean had been pretty excited about it, but Dean also thinks the Gum Wall in Seattle should be listed as a National Treasure. 

“Could the country’s smallest mountain also be considered the country’s tallest hill?” Sam asks, running his fingers over the embossed bronze compass perched at the highest point. New York, one-thousand six-hundred miles, Las Vegas, nine-hundred and thirty miles, San Francisco, one-thousand two-hundred and thirty miles. Sam burns the tip of his finger on the letter S. 

“Tallest hill sounds much more impressive. Marketing must have had the day off.” 

“I’m ninety-five percent sure this is bullshit anyway.” 

“What, you wouldn’t visit Staffield otherwise? It has so much to _offer_.” Dean gestures to the scatter of buildings in the near-distance.

“Not when Carhenge is an hour down the road.” 

Dean makes a yearning sound, stretches his arms above his head so his jacket bunches around his shoulders. “ _Carhenge_.” 

“Overrated, they should set the cars on fire, have a Midwest Burning Man.”

“Holy shit, Sammy. I would pay a disgusting amount to see that.”

“I know you would,” Sam says, and then, returning to reality, “Country’s smallest mountain.” 

“Country’s smallest mountain.” Dean nods resolutely.

Sam turns and looks back down to the dirt parking lot, canola flowers blanketing the surrounding fields, obnoxiously yellow, almost too bright to look at. The sky is a clean blue and the monolithic silos stand tall against the backdrop. 

“C’mon, I’m getting hay fever from just looking at this view,” Dean says, and sets off back down to level ground. 

\---

There’s a diner on the road into town, standing alone like they had built it expecting Staffield to boom. 

They’re between hunts, driving aimlessly, picking up local two-page newspapers from gas station magazine racks, rolling them up and sliding them over the counter to make space for their family sized bag of M&Ms and price-slashed semi-expired six-pack of Coke Zero Sugar. Cans and obituaries littered in the footwell at Sam’s feet. 

Sam is getting itchy. Too long without a case sets his mind on the run with nothing more productive to focus on. Just his brother and the forever stretch of tarmac over miles of flatlands. Sam has a habit of drifting, letting his eyes blur until the words on the daily crossword from a newspaper two states back lose meaning. Gets so in his own head with thoughts of past and present, of the demon and his plans. His brother had flicked the metal tab from his coke can into Sam’s forehead, told him to stop brooding, ‘ _that shit’s contagious, man.’_

They’re floating through limbo, and the only thing solid to dig his claws into is his brother. 

Sam has The Staffield Press spread over the width of the booth table, their mugs of coffee bleeding rings into the pages. Dean picks the crust off a chocolate muffin, sulking at the lack of pie. 

“Anything?” 

“Cattle mutilations, three weeks ago,” Sam says, flicking muffin crumbs off the text, aiming for Dean’s chest. 

“Bitch,” Dean complains, sweeping down his lap. “So nothing then.” 

Sam sighs, flipping to the sudoku and plucking a coloured pencil out from where they’re shoved for kids, next to the cutlery and serviettes. “Nothing then.” 

“Well, we did conquer a mountain today. We deserve a little _R and R_.”

“You want to stay here?” He scribbles blunt yellow into the corner of the page. 

“God no, we can make it to Alliance before it gets dark.”

Sam mindlessly puts numbers in boxes while they finish their coffee. He can feel Dean’s eyes on him, in breaks between staring out at the gravel lot. Makes him want to sit straight, or iron out his shirt with his hands, like he’s being scrutinised for existing. 

The door chimes and Dean tenses up in Sam’s peripheral vision. There’s a police cruiser parked next to the Impala, red and blue reflected in her chrome. 

Dean drinks out of his mug nonchalantly, peering over the ceramic and Sam’s shoulder. 

The cops take a seat at the bar. Two men, one balding in patches and the other looking like he should be well into his beach-side retirement. Dean shoots Sam a nervous look, both still very badly on edge since their bank stint in Milwaukee. He doubts they’ll be recognised this deep into nowhere territory but Sam ducks his head and slides to the edge of the booth in case they need to get out of Dodge. 

The waitress pours them their coffee without having to be asked. They’re not local police, badges from whichever town over had extra men to spare. Not much point having a full station in a community where the most heinous crime is teenagers smoking grass down the storm drains.

The waitress’ hand flutters to her chest when they tell her they’re here helping with the Dougherty murder case and she says, _‘in our small town?_ ’ and Sam thinks, especially in your small town. It’s easier to get away with monstrous things when there's no friendly neighbour around to hear.

Sam writes _CASE_ , in bright yellow next to the weekly quiz, looks to check Dean is paying attention. He’s picking muffin crumbs off his plate, the pad of his thumb pressed between his lips, surveying the word Sam had scribbled. 

There’s the usual, _‘he was such a sweetheart, helped me with my groceries when I was out with the flu last year, I can’t believe it…_ ” that they’ve heard once a case for the better half of their lives and the waitress is shaking her head, her hands jittering as she pours a mug for herself. Sam flicks the pencil at Dean. His brother frowns, wipes his hands down and writes _DOUBT_ in messy capitals. _People die all the time, Sammy,_ his head supplies in Dean’s tone of voice.

Sam worries at the inside of his cheek. Desperate for anything at this stage, Sam’s assuming the supernatural first and foremost; it’s how they were raised to think. 

Sam got slack at the back end of his third year in California. Windows were left unsalted the entire time he had lived with Jess. He hadn’t lost sleep over it. Spirits and demons were things of the highway world, where he had left his brother. A one-bedroom student apartment on the first floor of a decaying building already moaned around air bubbles in the pipes; a haunting of another kind. Squeaky floorboards said, _‘we’re fully leased, sorry for the inconvenience.’_

Thirteen months later, and Sam knows better. Things go bump in the night, indiscriminately, and if Dean knew that Sam had rolled over and left his soft belly exposed, he might take back what he had said about Jess’ death not being his fault. 

But the balding cop says the words, _‘torn in half, nothing like I’ve ever seen’_ and Dean changes his mind pretty fast. Circles Sam’s _CASE_ and adds his own exclamation mark. 

\---

It takes them all of five minutes to find the Dougherty residence. Crawling down back streets searching for the blue police tape and a commotion. 

Staffield is a mix of standalone trailers, rotary clothes lines with sheets hung out to dry in the afternoon sun and hastily built one-story houses, brick with yards four-times the size and dry with the summer. 

Dean leans into Sam’s space to look out the passenger side window; there’s no reason for it to make Sam uncomfortable, he focuses intently on the body being hauled into the ambulance. 

They lie about being FBI, they tell the truth about catching wind of the incident at the diner. _On the way to Alliance, ma’am, finishing up a job down south, thought we could be of help._ Everyone straightens up when they pull their badges, and maybe FBI is overkill, the local police look anxious, like they had assumed Feds only existed in late night procedural cop dramas. 

Dean does the talking, nodding along with what the woman is saying as she comes to terms with her freshly widowed state. She goes to tuck her hair behind her ears and misses, tells them through shaky breaths that it was their neighbour that did it.

“We’ve lived next to the Hansens for decades, they’re almost family, their kids used to run around our sprinklers in summer, y’know? Cliff was just -” She chokes on a sob, waving a hand in front of her face, trying to regain composure, “He was just returning the chainsaw. We have an overgrown lemon tree in the backyard, but it had taken him a while to get around to cutting it back.” 

There’s blood soaking into the grass by the knee-high chain fence that borders the two properties. It’s not yet browned, there’s too much of it to dry that fast. It’s an obscene amount, all of someone spilt out at once. Sam side-steps over the puddle. He wants to see the body. Wants to know what state it was left in. Look at what he’s become. 

“Was there an argument, ma’am?” Dean asks, glancing at Sam as he crouches to inspect the chainsaw where it’s been tossed to the side. There’s pieces of skin and viscera trapped up in the teeth. 

She nods. “I came outside when I heard Eric yelling. He was inconsolable, I’ve never seen him angry, never even raised his voice at the kids. Cliff had his hands up trying to settle him down and then Eric, he -” she can’t finish. 

Sam has a pretty good idea of what happened next. 

He stands, looks over the scene for anything suspicious; sulphur, discarded shifter skin, hex bag, anything at all that would make this an easy solve. Nothing is out of the ordinary - besides the heady smell of blood in afternoon heat, and the weeping widow, of course.

Sam ducks back under the police tape, and waits for Dean at the car. 

There’s a cat sitting on the hood. Pure white against pitch black, it looks so out of place Sam has to double take. It stares at Sam with huge blue eyes, like it’s been waiting for him. 

It doesn’t flee when Sam reaches out to pat it, tilting its head to the side so Sam can get its sweet spot. The charm dangling from its collar clinks, buried in its deep fur. Sam holds a simple silver crucifix between his fingers. 

“Hey, scram!” Dean says, shooing it away and out of Sam’s hands as he rounds to the drivers side. It slinks under a police car and out of sight. “If I find cat hair on the upholstery, you’re vacuuming out the entire cab.” 

“You’re not even allergic.” 

“I wear a lot of black, Sam. I’m not walking around looking like a fucking lint roller.” 

\---

He sits cross legged on the canola-yellow bedspread with his laptop balancing on a repurposed pillow. 

The room smells of dust, like it hasn’t been used in months, no one bothering to clean in the interim. They’ve left the door open wide, propped with the only spare chair. The fresh air does little to help; the earthy scent from the fields mixing with the stale of the room no better than before. Dean’s got newspaper clippings and notes from their interviews this afternoon laid out in front of him like a rug.

“Split in half?” Sam asks.

“Sideways, through the middle, like slicing tomato. Just with more,” Dean gestures, looking for the right word, “juice.” 

“Gross.” 

“Maybe he was fucking Eric’s wife?” Dean says and Sam hides a wince at that word from his brother’s mouth. Crude. It grates on him badly for some reason. 

“Maybe,” Sam mumbles, trying to find any record on the internet that suggests that Staffield is more than a small mountain and canola hotspot. “I don’t think that's motive enough to saw someone in half.”

“I dunno, she was hot.” Sam looks at Dean incredulously. When he notices Sam’s not impressed he tries to save face. “In a MILF kinda way.” 

Sam shakes his head, not as amused as he might usually be. He rubs the heel of his palm into his chest, trying to relieve the tightness that had started in the car, watching Dean book them a room through the reception windows. Perhaps he’s the one allergic to cats. 

“Maybe it’s a spirit, like in Illinois,” Sam says quietly, uncomfortable. “Roosevelt, you remember?”

Dean frowns in a way that says, ‘ _Rockford? When you almost put a bullet in my brain? Haha, yeah I remember.’_

“Dr. Ellicott's little stint?” Dean replies instead, not looking up from where he’s shuffling paper. 

“Yeah.” 

He gets a painful flash reminder of Dean laying prone underneath him, looking up at Sam in disappointment, hurt from the shotgun round to the chest, but mostly from Sam’s words. The quiet click of the empty pistol. _‘You hate me that much?’_

A year ago, when the wound from losing Jess was still open and weeping. When they were still tracking down Dad. When they were still dancing around each other, awkward and off-kilter, three years apart and out of sync. Every insignificant frustration he had rose to the surface and Sam had felt it bubble over, like he would die if he kept his thoughts to himself a minute longer. Acid from his mouth, spitting venom. 

Sam had pointed a gun between Dean’s eyes in a similar kind of murderous rage as Eric Hansen. Turned it on his very own brother. His anger had been watered and fertilized, but it had bloomed from a seed that Sam had planted there himself. 

Now their father is ashes, and Sam has quietly come to terms with the fact that what he had been working towards was a pipedream, something he was never meant to have. It wasn’t ever Dean’s fault, Dean was just doing his best to get Sam through. 

He should have been more grateful. 

So, Sam thinks he knows a thing or two about that kind of anger. It wouldn’t take much of a push here. Generations of families brought up amongst each other. An insular community where everyone knows everything about everyone. The suffocation of seeing the same streets, the same people day in and day out. The stress of living week to week, scrambling to stay out of poverty. Kids raised on family farms, with no say in their own future. 

Or maybe Cliff Dougherty had actually just been fucking Eric’s wife. Nothing supernatural about it, pure unadulterated rage. 

Sam collapses onto his back and stares at the ceiling - pale yellow too, presses his fingertip hard into his sternum and thinks about how it’s supposed to be a happy colour; swallow yellow paint and be poisoned by serotonin. However, the shade doesn’t make him anything but anxious and uneasy. 

Dean picks himself up off the floor, stretches his arms over his head in a way that lifts his shirt to expose the strip of skin below his belly button, the low cut of his hips. Sam keeps his eyes on the popcorned roof.

Van Gogh had painted sunflowers in bright yellow because they were his brother’s favourite flower, and he thinks if Dean made an off-hand comment about liking the canola, Sam might try tasting yellow as well.

\---

Sam’s gotten pretty good at distinguishing dreams from premonitions. The future is told in full-colour HD with the headaches to prove it. Dreams are fast forwards and VHS-like rewinds, fuzzy with the who, what, when and why unimportant. 

This, however, he struggles to discern. 

He’s in Staffield, walking the footpath of Main Street. It’s desolate, mid-afternoon, shops open but empty. The town to himself, apocalyptic. He is in full control of his body. Lucid-like. Dean is not by his side, and that’s how he thinks he knows, at first. Sam dreams of his brother more than anything else.

The United Church of the Plains rests at the edge of town, standing desolate in a field of its own. The same half-felled, twisted wire fence that borders most properties runs here too, separating what is and what is not holy-ground. The building is too small for such a large plot, brown prairie grass encroaching on the clapboard walls. A frayed tire swing sways outside the vestry.

He’s in front of the billboard, suddenly, snapped forward. Dream-like afterall. 

They hadn’t come this far through town, his imagination pulling pieces from a hundred different churches he’s seen before. Except it’s a solid form, not static, and he can see the leafy details in the shadows from the overhanging tree against the wood panels, the paint peeling from the boards, the exact pigment of the stained glass. He doesn’t know how he can imagine this in such clarity if it’s not something he was put here to see. 

He ducks at the sound of wings loud by his ear, a crow flying low to perch on the top of the billboard, drawing Sam’s attention to the words written there.

_‘DOES YOUR BROTHER KNOW THAT YOU WANT HIM?’_

Individually placed letters, bold and tinged brown with the weather. Sam can’t look away and he prays, _dream dream dream_. This sort of introspection could have come from no one but himself. His secret, his affliction, on display as a reminder. He put this here. Don’t forget, Sam, you’re abhorrent. This is all you. 

Displayed in front of God, letters rearranged from gospels and turned sacrilege.

“Sammy?” 

His brother is behind him, everything turned nightmarish abruptly. He says, panicked, “Dean, don’t -” and reaches out to turn them around, so that Dean won’t see how he has been gutted, drained, his heart and all the innermost parts of himself hung up billboard-bright.

Sam wakes up to something heavy on his chest - Dean’s hand, and he scrambles to get his brother away, pushes hard at wherever part of Dean he can find purchase on, frenzied and frantic, sleep-riddled and crazy with the idea that his dream might be absorbed transdermally, seeping through Sam where Dean had laid a hand on him. 

“Don’t fucking touch me,” he snaps, too loud, too harsh and Dean flinches back. 

“Woah, calm down,” Dean says, hands raised in surrender, backing away from Sam’s bed. “You were dreaming, dude.” He looks hurt, years of waking Sam up this same way without violent backlash.

His head isn’t splitting itself open but the tightness in his chest is forefront and Sam puts his head between his knees and breathes, does his best to believe that Dean is right, that it was a dream and not some fucked up branch of fate.

\---

Clifford Dougherty lies in two parts on the steel table. 

The morgue assistant tells them, with white coat sleeves pushed to her elbows, that someone would have to be possessed to commit anything this brutal and Sam doesn’t disagree because they haven’t got solid evidence to rule out demons yet. 

No other abnormalities, all organs present, bloodwork fine. Besides being split in half under the ribs, there's nothing else odd.

Sam pulls the sheet back to look for himself, morbidly curious. Staples line his chest, railway tracks pulled into a Y where he’s been thrown back together. Funny when Sam’s pretty sure all his organs could be accounted for with one glance into his gaping, halved torso. 

“How much strength would one need for a clean swipe like this?” Dean turns and leans into Sam’s space to whisper. Sam stiffens, still jittery from his dream, semi-dissociated and going through the motions, like he’s yet to wake up. 

“A hysterical amount.” 

Dean hums, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, thinking. The morgue assistant silently asks Sam if she can cover Mr Dougherty again and he nods. He wonders how they will go about preparing the body to be buried. Stitch the two pieces together with heavy duty sutures. Line up top and bottom and make him whole again under a dress shirt tucked into dress pants. Retinge his blueing skin a believable pink with cosmetics and pretend he isn’t in two obvious pieces in the casket.

“Who is that?” Dean asks, pointing at another occupied table pushed to the corner of the room.

They’d overlooked it on the way in, the sheet covered body, toe tag looped around pruning, protruding feet. 

“Ah, that’s Ethel Guthrie,” the MA says, busying herself in a drawer, disinterested. “She was ninety-five.”

“We weren’t aware of any other deaths in town recently.”

“Yes, well, Mrs Guthrie didn’t really live in town.” 

“Cause of death?”

The MA looks up from her hands to level an incredulous expression at Sam, repeats herself. “She was ninety-five.”

“If she didn’t live in town then where was she from?”

“A few miles west. Old farmhouse out in the canola. Honestly, everyone kind of assumed she had already died,” she says as Dean pulls back the material covering her face, frowns. “No one had heard from her in years. Most of us avoid that street, y’know?”

“Why’s that?”

She stands and crosses her arms over her chest, says, accusatively, “Aren’t you here on the Dougherty case? What does it matter?” 

“Just covering bases, ma’am.” 

Sam puts on his _it's all part of the job_ face, pleads with a smile that has convinced the toughest sheriffs and the most secretive witnesses to spill beans in the past. The MA chews her lips and sighs, falls in line with the rest. 

“She had a reputation. Parents tell their kids not to ride out that way. I grew up hearing it too - all the weird stuff that happened around her house. People called her a witch.”

Dean drops the sheet and takes a large step back from her body. “What kind of weird stuff?”

“I don’t know, I never went out there. People used to say they saw her in the fields talking to herself. She never left her property, it’s all unpaved road and it wasn’t uncommon for cars to end up in the ditch, blame it on the proximity to her house. I don’t even want to touch her to be honest. I’m not particularly superstitious, but after Mr Dougherty’s death…” 

“Does she have any family?”

“No, her husband died well over two decades ago. No one bothered to submit anything for the paper, she wasn’t well liked, you see.” 

Dean levels a smirk in his direction, evidence, maybe. Witches, unfortunately. Sam feels the excitement of a lead flutter in his chest. 

“What’s the address?”

\---

The late Mrs Guthrie lived and died in her four bedroom two bathroom family homestead ten miles out of town. 

Sam gets out to push back the gate, the heavy chain loops around the fence lazily, dragging along the gravel and ripping out weeds as Sam pullsit across and makes space for the car. 

Dean revs the engine impatiently, and Sam flips him off as he passes, the tires kicking up stones as Dean accelerates too fast on loose ground. 

Sam walks the length of the driveway, the two story building backed away from the main road, hidden behind huge oaks and overgrown grass. It’s cool under the shade, the wind picked up from the surrounding flat plains rustles the trees overhead. Sam takes a moment alone to breathe, away from his brother’s judgement. 

They’d lived in places like this, abandoned houses set just out of town enough so no one would come knocking. Sam had read under towering trees in back gardens across the country, filled out college paperwork with grass itching at his arms. Any chance to get away from the drone of the radio their dad would keep on when he was home, classic rock and the unsettling smell of someone else’s things. 

Dean would sit with him, sometimes, when Sam’s hackles weren’t raised with teenage moods, throwing knives while Sam did calculus against his knee. Would find Sam out in the yard after a fight with Dad, stand with his fists raised, ‘ _c’mon, Sammy, dish it out’._ They’d tousle and sweat until Sam had forgotten what exactly had made him barge out of the house in the first place. Dean’s always been able to read him best. Knew how to settle his hot-headedness; the mediator, a dividing wall that stopped Sam and Dad from tearing out each other’s throats. 

Or was, when the worst things to happen were being pulled out of school before the end of year, or Dad taking Dean on hunts and leaving Sam alone. Now John Winchester is dead and Sam’s seeing the future behind his eyelids and there’s a fire in his chest that makes him want to bare his teeth at anyone that looks at him twice. Dean’s old methods for settling Sam’s bursts of ire have long since expired, especially now that Dean is more often than not the reason for them. 

Dean’s waiting for him at the front steps, leaning on the car with his arms crossed over his chest. It’s a strange picture, his brother and his brother’s car, leather and chrome in the shadow of a building woven with vines and rotting wood. 

The house is an off white, speckled brown and black where the paint has peeled and mould has settled in. A porch sprawls the entire outside and almost every inch of the undercover area is filled with hanging pots and overgrown plants, an assortment of random furniture, household items and gardening tools. It’s as though they had run out of space indoors, _stuff_ spilling out onto the patio. There’s a ceramic angel beside the welcome mat that reads ‘ _welcome’_ , the script twisted into an ichthys. 

“Take your time,” Dean says, and whatever good Sam’s few minutes of solitude had done is tossed aside with his brother’s impatience. 

Sam sighs, heads up the stairs and takes a knee to pick the lock. 

The porch is a good primer for what they’re faced with as they walk through the interior. 

It’s maximalism that borders hoarding. Walls covered from floor to ceiling in framed photographs, paintings, china plates and cross-stitch. Bookshelves overflow onto the floor in the hallway, affronting floral couches and throw pillows in every colour and pattern. There is no clear flat surface, all either supporting a dying pot plant or dirty dish. 

“Fuck, I’m surprised she wasn’t crushed to death,” Dean says, sidestepping a toppeled lamp. 

The wallpaper in the kitchen is an assault to the eyes, seventies florals in brown and orange, hidden behind hung pots, pans and more photographs. There's an inordinate amount of religious memorabilia. Tiny saints behind glass cabinets, crosses hung high. All the visual stimulus gives him a cluster headache. 

Magnets cover the entire fifties Kelvinator fridge, metal handle sticking out amongst faded polaroids. Pictures of the house from decades ago, Mrs Guthrie at her husband’s side, sitting on the front porch, posed in front of the expanse of canola fields that push up against the back fence and roll down the hill. There’s a sepia photo of a young version of Mrs Guthrie in front of the town hall, and most notably, a cat, tucked up on a crocheted blanket, with huge blue eyes and pristine white fur. 

“Hey, Dean,” Sam calls, hearing his brother’s boots stomp down the hallway.

“What?”

“Isn’t this the same cat as yesterday?” Sam points to the polaroid. 

Dean snatches it out from under the magnet to inspect closer.

“Maybe? You’re the one that pet it.”

“It had a crucifix on its collar,” Sam says, fumbling to catch the picture when Dean flicks it at him. “Kind of tracks with this whole aesthetic.” 

“Yeah, I think the old hag was too busy bothering God to have time to dabble in the occult.”

Sam huffs at Dean’s disrespect. There’s no evidence here to suggest she was anything besides an old lady that lost the means of travelling further than the borders of her property. Bound to the house by age.

Kids spread rumours like they spread nits and the flu, quickly and without care. Exaggerate the truth for their own popularity. _You know the big old house out of town? Yeah, they say the old lady who lives there has gone crazy with loneliness. Asher and Billy jumped the fence two weeks ago and their dog died the next day. I’m not lying, I swear. She’s a witch._

They check upstairs just in case there’s a hidden altar or some other unlikely evidence. The four poster bed Mrs Guthrie was found in hasn’t been remade since her body was removed. The whole house has been left untouched with no family left to tie up affairs, divvy out belongings. Sam wonders if they’ll bother with a funeral. 

Sam locks the house back up when they’re done, pushes the gate back closed, feeling too empathetic for a ninety year old woman he had never met. It’s miserable, to think about living that long alone, surrounded by possessions previously shared with someone you loved. Being forgotten by the town and feared by the people in it. 

The only crime it looked like Mrs Guthrie had committed was one of eclectic hoarding and involuntary isolation.

Dean beeps the horn, looking at Sam over his shoulder through the rear window, gesturing for him to hurry up, to quit staring into space and Sam has to grind his teeth together to stop himself from snapping something back. He does the math to figure out how long it would take him to walk back to town instead of riding shotgun stuck beside his brother, who is doing a good job of getting further and further under Sam’s skin with stupid comments and general attitude. 

Sam gets in the car and keeps quiet. He’s been feeling prickly ever since he woke up in the middle of the night. Irritable and tired with lack of sleep. Exhausted despite it only being midmorning, Dean’s presence is a constant reminder of the dream, the words on the billboard, his own guilt. It’s taxing. 

He’s a master of shaking off inappropriate dreams about his brother. He’s been having them since he hit puberty and no one's been the wiser. Last night’s should be no different, yet it sticks to him resolutely. He remembers it too well, the look on Dean’s face when he had turned around. 

He coughs around his cold coffee when they pass it on their way back into town; United Church of the Plains, exactly where it had been in his dream. The same colour clapboard, the same tyre swing, the same billboard front and centre. Sam holds his breath, feels his heart in his throat as he turns his head to read.

‘“LET LOVE BE GENUINE. ABHOR WHAT IS EVIL; HOLD FAST TO WHAT IS GOOD.” - ROMANS 12:9’

It’s not as though he was expecting it to be the same as it had in his sleep. The situation is off, he’s not on foot, it wasn’t a premonition because no church of God would parade words like that on street-front signage, _‘You want to fuck your brother? Come inside and we’ll tell you exactly what hell is like! Here, take a pamphlet!’_

Sam, however, has no idea how he could have pieced together the structure in perfect clarity before he had seen it with his own eyes. Hopes desperately that it’s just another mutation of the whole psychic issue. First it was telekinesis, now it’s having precise knowledge of places he hasn’t visited. 

Dean is looking at him out the corner of his eye, slowing down as they hit the residential area. Sam wipes the coffee from his chin with the back of his sleeve. 

“You got something you want to confess, Sammy? I can make a stop.”

“Shut it.” 

“You got a little -” Dean says, pointing at Sam’s collar, flicks his nose when Sam turns it down to look to check for stray flecks of coffee. 

Dean’s continuously pulled this prank since Sam was four, but Sam is so in his own head it takes him by surprise. The shock, and the fact that he fell for it so easily makes him snap. He grabs at Dean’s hand before he can remove it from his space, twists his fingers back with intent to hurt.

“What the fuck!” Dean yells, pulling back when Sam lets him go, rubbing his knuckles. “I’m fucking driving, Sam.” 

“Don’t pull that shit then.” 

“It was a fucking joke. Jesus.” 

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Evidently, fuck.” 

Sam tosses his empty cup into the back footwell and hopes the dregs soak into the carpet. 

\---

Sam picks butchers paper from his tongue, peeling it back from around his chicken shop hamburger. The bread is too dry, the meat too oily, and he feels a little ill. Sam leans against the hood of the Impala and quietly mopes. 

“Penny for your thoughts?” Dean asks around a mouthful of food, sitting on the car beside him.

Sam tucks the burger back in its bag and lobs it underarm into the park trash can they’ve pulled up next to. Dean laughs a singular _‘ha’_ when it hits the corner and bounces onto the grass. 

“Strike through witch,” Sam says, standing to pick up his garbage sadly. 

“Thank fuck for that.” 

“You think Eric was possessed?”

“Maybe, there was no sulfur. There’s really been no other strange deaths?”

“Nope.” 

Dean hums, scrunching his paper into a ball. “Let’s go pay him a visit.”

At least the park is nice. The grass is green where it hits the small man-made lake, complete with overgrown, bird-dense island in the middle. The sprinklers click noisily with nothing to drown them out. Pigeons pick at crumbs in the concreted barbeque area and the playground that consists entirely of a set of monkey bars and one swing is empty. The town is quiet at noon on a weekday - or maybe this is just its perpetual state. 

Sam rubs at his chest, he feels short of breath similar to how he had felt after waking up from being possessed by Meg, his lungs tight from her chain smoking. Like he’d spent a night following Dean around a hazy bar, inhaling the second-hand smoke that curled around the neon. 

Sam thinks about the billboard. The real one they’d driven past, not the one from his dream. Is it evil for him to hold fast to loving his brother? Dean, who has been the centre of everything good in Sam’s world for his entire lifetime? 

Sam has had years to deal with how he feels, and has held it tight as one of the only stable things through times when he was guaranteed to lose himself. 

Moving from new school to new school, relearning cliques and how to hold himself in his growing teenage body, Dean was in the car park waiting for the bell at three-thirty, and Sam was in love with him. At college, when Sam was alone in a new city, struggling to pay rent and living for weeks on rice and one dollar loaves of bread, Dean was sending one-word chicken-scratch postcards from the other side of the country, and Sam was in love with him. When he was right here, losing himself in the passenger seat after Jess had died, Dean was flicking skittles at his forehead, making him play twenty questions so he wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel, and Sam was in love with him. 

_Let love be genuine._

If that love is evil then what is he to hold fast to?

 _Faith_ , Sam thinks. It’s supposed to be about faith. Yet, his faith in God has always come second to the faith he has in his brother. 

His eggs are all in one basket and the basket has Dean’s name on it. Everything revolves around him. Sam’s mood, Sam’s thoughts, Sam’s independence. It’s suffocating. Who is he without Dean? 

Sam bristles, frustrated with himself. 

Something hits him on the back of the head, Dean’s rubbish falling to the ground at his feet. Sam digs his nails into his palm and turns around to glare, viciously.

“Sorry man, I was aiming for the bin,” his brother lies, shrugging and leaning back on his palms to soak in the afternoon warmth. 

His jacket is open at his sides, down to a single shirt underneath, his head tipped back and eyes closed against the sun. His freckles stand stark, dotting down and under his collar, his throat exposed with the stretch. 

The embodiment of Sam’s love sits against his brother’s sternum, glinting gold in the sun.

Sam can’t fucking stand him. 

\---

He gets his feet on the sidewalk as Dean pulls the car to a stop in front of the Sheriff’s office, unwilling to be in the car with his brother for any longer than he has to. 

“Woah, what’s the rush? It’s not like Eric is going anywhere.”

Sam doesn’t give Dean an answer. He doesn’t have one for himself. 

He’s done with today, done with the case, and wishes they hadn’t stuck around to hear what the police had said in the diner. Maybe if Sam wasn’t so desperately intent on finding a job they could have seen the Staffield from the top of the hill and left it at a distance. 

Sam knows he’s being groundlessly crotchety. It’s not Dean’s fault Sam wants to both split his lip and then kiss it better. 

It’s all connected, traced back to the one source. It’s not about Dean. Sure, the relentless tapping of his ring on the wheel makes him clench his jaw, but it’s only because he’s hyper aware of everything his brother does, because of the dream, because this is how he’s always been. It’s Sam’s fault, and if he wasn’t so sick, he might have seen something else on the billboard behind his eyes. Then maybe he’d be irritable at his brother for more brotherly reasons. 

There’s a lot that Sam resents about himself, but his infatuation with Dean is paramount, and all reasons for his self-loathing consolidate back to this one twisted part of himself. 

Sam catches movement in his peripheral as he’s got his hand on the door of the office. Looks to his left to see a blink of white disappear around the corner. He ignores Dean’s confused noise and turns to follow. 

Mrs Guthrie’s cat watches him from atop the dumpster. Its coat is still as pristine as yesterday, blinding white against the drab side-alley backdrop. 

“No Sammy, we can’t take it home with us. I’ll get you some sea monkeys if you’re that desperate for a friend.”

“Someone must be looking after it,” Sam says, trying very hard not to bite. 

Dean huffs, disinterested. Sam walks closer, its blue eyes tracking him as he goes. It flicks its ear and pays no attention to Dean behind him. 

“Did it walk all the way from the property into town? Shouldn’t it be, I don’t know, dirtier?” 

“Cats are an enigma, man. Why do you care so much? Haven’t you always been more of a dog person?” 

Sam frowns. There’s something about it that doesn’t sit right with Sam, and while it's highly probable he’s reading too much into it, he can’t help feel uneasy. It doesn’t blink, stares at Sam like it’s seen too much, or knows too much. It makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle. 

“C’mon, we have a job to do? Remember?” Dean says, putting a hand on Sam’s arm. “You can come back and priss over it when we’re done.” It’s a concerned gesture but all it does is make Sam jump. Dean can’t touch him, not right now; not while he’s primed and guaranteed to snap at the most insignificant things. Sam shoves him off, pushes him back with a hand on his chest, does so without guilt. It’s forceful enough for Dean to stumble over his feet. He looks back at Sam with wide eyes. 

It’s satisfying. An energy thrums through him, bubbles up and begs to be used. He breathes easily for the first time all day, and contemplates doing it again. Shoving his brother into the wall, splitting his head on the bricks. Dean wouldn’t expect it, not from his little brother. He’d go down easily, hairline streaked red, look up at Sam shocked. Maybe he’d make Dean take it, shove himself down Dean’s throat, make him choke. 

The back office door flings open with a scrape against the floor, shocking Sam out of his violent thoughts. The noise spooks the cat, and Sam watches it jump up onto the mounted air conditioner unit and onto the roof out of sight as an officer walks into the alley with a cigarette hanging from his lips. 

“Uh, can I help you boys?” 

Dean scrambles up some lame excuse as Sam realigns himself in reality, letting Dean grab onto his jacket hard and pull him out of the alley. 

“You gonna shove me again?” Dean asks when Sam shrugs him off for the second time, albeit less murderously. He knows he should feel bad, digs around and tries to find guilt in himself, comes back empty-handed. He only feels the remnants of gratification, how freeing it was to loosen the slack on his chain. 

“I don’t know. Are you going to continue being an asshole?” 

“What’s your fucking problem?” 

_It’s you. You, my problem is you,_ Sam thinks and doesn’t say. He bites his cheek hard enough to taste blood and turns his back on his brother.

\---

Sam’s mood worsens in the interrogation room. 

Dean takes the reins while Sam stands with his back against the door, and thinks about how they’ve accidentally swung this into a good cop, bad cop situation. 

Eric Hansen is handcuffed to the table, looking despondent and depressed. He’s sweaty and nervous, side-eying Sam, twitchy. It makes Sam agitated to watch, just stop, stop.

He talks fast, spilling words all over the table. “No, I did it, it was all me. I could have stopped, do you know what it feels like to saw someone in half? It’s not a quick affair. Cliff got a promotion at work, the one I was riding on, at the mills, you’ve seen ‘em?” 

Dean sits back in the plastic chair, the second one pulled out beside and empty with Sam unwilling to sit so close to his brother right now. 

“Mr Hansen, did you notice anything strange before the incident?” Dean says evenly, textbook. 

“I had a bad day at work, I was frustrated. I’ve never laid a hand on my wife, ever. We’ve been married twenty years. I hit her. She asked me to take the bins out and I hit her. It was like everything overflowed and I couldn’t…I’m not a violent person.” 

Sam scoffs too loudly. That’s what they all say. Get out of jail free, cliche, come up with better sob stories for Christ’s sake. 

Dean shoots him a look, scowls, _dude._ Sam turns up his nose. 

“Nothing ever happens in this town, I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’ve lived here all my life, I see the same streets every day, I work the same job every day, I see the same people every day. Nothing changes, I’m tired of it.”

“So what? A little murder to shake things up?” Sam says to Dean’s dismay. 

Eric looks at him, the links of the cuffs rattling as his hands shake badly. “I had a dream - a nightmare. I was in front of the church and it was written there on the board. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, it wouldn’t leave me.”

 _“What_ was written?” Dean asks, confused and Sam goes still.

“What I hate most about myself.”

Sam feels nauseous, something searing hot, poured down his back at the words. His skin prickles with sweat and his mouth coats itself in that thin kind of saliva you get when you’re about to empty your guts. 

“I do good work, I deserved the promotion. I’ve been short changed my entire life. I’m tired of being made small, being cut down. It all just came to a crux after seeing it laid out. It’s eaten at me, always been the thing that I come back to, what I beat myself up about. I’m sure you all have something like that. Everyone does.” 

Eric keeps talking, borderline hysterical. Sam needs him to stop, doesn’t want to hear the rest. 

“You know... You know how frustrating it is to have a bad song stuck on repeat in your head? And - and how they say listening to the song in full will make it stop? I had to make it go away. I had to do something.”

Dean says something that Sam doesn’t hear over the blood rushing in his ears. His own nightmare laid out and mirrored in front of him. Eric, shackled and frantic at the table, a warning sign for his own demise. Not a dream, not a vision, but a curse. Sam can’t breathe around the tightness in his chest. 

Dean turns his attention on Sam, his expression quickly shifting to that same concern from the alley outside and Sam can’t, he can’t have Dean look at him like this, can’t have him look at him at all.

Sam fumbles at the door handle, launches himself out and back through the front entrance, tries the passenger side of the car before remembering his brother has the keys. Sam rests his forehead on the roof, cool metal on his overheated face and does his best to steady his breathing. 

“Sam,” Dean says from behind, not tempting fate by touching him like he had earlier. Sam’s grateful because he thinks he’d probably break his fingers for real this time. “What the hell? He was in the middle of spilling his guts.”

“No one said you had to follow me out.”

“You’re the one that wanted to take this case, you could at least act like you want to be here.” Dean harumphs and Sam lifts his head, pushes himself upright, turns to face his brother.

“I do want to be here.” 

“Well forgive me for not seeing it.” 

Dean’s frustrated, eyebrows pinched together and looking at Sam like he’s trying to figure him out. 

He should tell him. Sam knows that it would make everything easier. They’d be able to solve the case with the advantage of first-hand symptoms. But Dean would want to pry, ask questions that Sam would rather die than answer. What would he even say? _I’m sorry I’ve been such a bitch, Dean. I want to fuck you so bad it’s making me homicidal._

Sam laughs at himself and Dean flinches back at the noise. The reaction is appropriate; his brother really should be scared of him. 

“Sam.” 

“I’ll meet you at the motel,” Sam says, worried what he might do if he is forced to sit crowded in the passenger seat a foot away from Dean, his own specific, personified kindling, guaranteed to light the wildfire in his chest. Dean lets him go, and Sam doesn’t hear the thrum of the Impala starting until he’s far enough away that it could just be his imagination.

He avoids the motel for as long as he can. Circles the block, walks down the main street, shop lights flickering off, open signs flipped closed with the setting sun. Or maybe they’ve just seen him coming. Locked the doors and windows, sensed the aura emitting from him. Whatever infliction he has, it makes him feel powerful, the way he gets immediately after a hunt, with a gun still warm in his hands and the dead body of something foul at his feet. 

Sam hesitates at the entrance to the town’s only bar. Fantasies for a beat about starting a fight. Maybe a little obvious hustling, maybe a little name calling, maybe a little blood; he wants the ache of bruised knuckles. 

He knows if he returns to the motel with a black eye, it would only cause Dean to fuss, force him to explain himself, so Sam keeps walking.

As all roads lead to Rome, Sam finds himself back in front of the church. The billboard is dark, its spotlight blown out, covered in dust and dead moths. The words read the same as this morning. Sam jumps the fence and sits on the tire swing under the tree, hesitantly. It creaks under his weight. 

Sam puts his head in his hands and retraces his steps over the last few days.

Mountain, diner, crime scene, morgue, homestead, Sheriff's office. He hadn’t felt anything off until he’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. The dream must have been caused by something yesterday. Sam’s pretty sure they tipped the waitress fairly, didn’t run over anyone’s hedges on their way into town. He could have been nicer to Mrs Dougherty, but she was in too much of a state to be considered a suspect, seeing as her husband was collateral damage. Maybe it’s something in the canola. 

Or maybe it wasn’t anything he’d done at all. Maybe the curse just picks out the most guilty, filters through until it finds something already there to work with. Saw Sam, ripe with self-hatred, and dug in for a feast. 

The sun sets as he calms himself down. He digs his heels in the grass and sways himself on the swing, watching the sun dip behind the elevated water tower. _Staffied_ painted in bold red on the side.

He considers paying for another room for the night, his stomach rolling at the idea of having to sleep in the quiet dark beside his brother, listening to him kick at the covers and breathe in that loud, not-quite-snore Dean does when he’s dead-tired. Watching the red glow of the clock as time crawls.

Sam left the bulk of the cash they took from their last hustle in Dean’s wallet, and their assortment of cards are in the glovebox of the car that his brother keeps locked. Sam knows how to jack to the window, but he also knows Dean has a freaky mental link with the Impala, especially after he rebuilt her in his semi-manic grief after the crash and the subsequent death of their father. Dean knows when someone’s standing too close with a key primed between their knuckles just as well as he knows when Sam is about to trip him up the stairs. His sixth sense: his baby and his brother.

It would only make Dean suspicious, anyway. It’s a futile idea. Not to mention sleeping on the other side of the wall makes Sam feel wrong. They’ve never resorted to that, even after their worst fights. Bodies faced away and rolled to the furthest side of the bed, pressed into the wall, but never out of sight. 

Sam stands, breathes in and lets it out in one huge sigh. Clearing his head and steeling himself for the night. He can do this. He’s a master at suppressing the urge to touch his brother. In both the debauched sense and the fisticuff sense. He’s being tested, the final exam; it all comes down to this. 

\---

The shower is running when Sam closes the door behind him, sliding the chain across in a way that feels damming. The television quietly plays some sepia western. Dean’s left the bathroom door cracked like he usually does, steam curling around the roof and making the room stuffy and hard to breathe around. His tight chest doesn’t make anything easier. Sam realises that’s probably part of the curse too. 

Dean’s been doing research, Dad’s journal open on the page for pesanta’s. _Louisiana, May ‘88, black dog._ The word _nightmares_ is circled, and a child’s drawing is duct taped beside it, folded to the side so the text can be read. 

The artist was either him or Dean, or maybe a joint effort. A dog scribbled in rainbow coloured pencils, blunt shaky lines. Sam doesn’t remember drawing it; too young. Those early years are blurred and half-repressed, he remembers Dean and diving for leaves in motel pools, sometimes arcades if Dad let Dean bring Sam along. Sugar-sick on the sour candy bought with the tickets they’d won; or stolen. Nothing of cases or monsters or other things that didn’t revolve around his brother in some way. 

“Hey,” Dean says, making Sam jump, having missed the water turning off. He’s fishing through his duffel for clean clothes. Sam doesn’t look. Fear sticks a lump in his throat. He doesn’t trust himself. He should have slept out in the fields. 

Sam clears his throat. “Pesantas?” 

“Yeah, maybe. Or luitviens.”

Sam says, carefully, “Nightmares.”

“Nightmares.” 

Dean’s smart when it comes to hunting, has a sense for picking the important parts out of conversations. Reading into details. If he was more enthusiastic about research, then he might be truly terrifying. Sam thinks, _that’s what I’m here for._ Sam thinks, _that’s all I’m here for,_ and then quickly shuts himself up. 

There’s a thunk as Dean tosses his wet towel onto the tiles in the bathroom where Sam will undoubtedly step on it later and soak his socks. Sam doesn’t say anything, flips the thin pages of the journal. 

“I don’t think it’s either.”

“Huh?” Dean asks from beside him, leaning into Sam’s space to reach for the television remote on the table. Sam can feel the showers warmth on his skin, the fake-rose smell of the tiny complimentary 3-in-one soap. Dean’s hair is wet and messy and Sam’s entire body stiffens like he’s been electrocuted by proximity. Dean turns and slips the television to mute and Sam immediately misses the ambience of thudding hooves and firing guns. 

“I just…” Sam pauses, realising he doesn’t have any evidence to back himself up. Both those creatures manifest to physical beings. He hadn’t woken up with anything heavier than Dean’s hand on his chest. Both pesantas and luitviens sit on the victim's chest while they’re asleep. If there had been one on his, Dean would have seen it, scrambling off the bed and away. Besides, the symptom is less the nightmare and more the consequences of it. 

“Sure, they both indict bad dreams but neither of them, or any nightmare inducing monster that I know of turns people murderous.”

“What if Hansen was already on the edge, just needed the little push?”

Sam shivers. Has nothing to retort because Dean might be right. Even without the irritability boost, the dream itself could be enough to tip someone over. A sign from God.

“Maybe.” 

Dean hums, grabs one of the books he had resting on the table and rearranges himself against the headboard. He’s dressed down from the shower, t-shirt and jeans and Sam can see his waist where his shirt has slid up, waistband low on his hips without a belt. A single disastrous flash of skin, Sam remembers how terribly he wants to put his mouth there. 

“Could call Bobby.”

“No,” Sam says, too quickly, explaining himself under Dean’s careful scrutiny. Does something, anything so he’s not caught staring at his brother. Sam pulls out his laptop, abusing the spacebar until the screen lights up. “We’ve only been here two days, let's give it more time. We can go talk to Mrs Hansen tomorrow, there’ll be a library in Alliance, we can make a day of it, do some serious research.” 

Dean makes a show of groaning, tipping his head back to look at the roof. Sam’s not looking. Sam’s very busy with his computer. “Awesome.”

They lapse into what would usually be comfortable silence. Years of quiet nights buried in books, the radio on low, or the television playing reruns of Unsolved Mysteries. 

But Dean hasn’t turned the television off mute and Sam can feel his eyes on the back of his neck. It’s crushingly quiet besides the click of the keys as Sam types something into Google in an attempt to look like he’s not going insane in his seat. Dean is giving Sam the opportunity to explain his behaviour. Sam grits his teeth and waits for the inevitably prying. 

“You enjoy your walk?” Dean finally asks. 

“Yeah.” 

Keep it to the point. Dean can’t do much with one word answers. He’ll get the hint. Don’t let him get to you, Sam. You can’t afford to blow up. 

“Gonna tell me why you felt the need to take it?” 

“There’s nothing to tell.” 

“Bullshit,” Dean growls, and Sam can hear the shift of the mattress as Dean climbs off the bed to stand. Too important a conversation to have from opposite sides of the room, apparently. 

“Lay off.” 

Dean comes to stand beside him, and Sam shuts the laptop with feigned nonchalance, even though he’s sure his brother can see how his hands shake with the restraint not to slam it closed, shatter the screen into glass spiderwebs.

“How about how you shoved me? We gonna pretend that didn’t happen too?”

Sam doesn’t say anything, jaw clenched so he doesn’t bite. Dean is looking down at him, gesturing with frustration, waiting with his palms outstretched for Sam to give him anything. Sam turns and looks him dead in the eyes for the first time all day. Pointed and purposeful. _Back off, leave it alone._

Dean takes it too far, Dean always takes it too far. An extra ten miles on the speedometer, an extra few shots before going home, pushing the limits like he forgets his actions have consequences. 

“You haven’t been this intolerable since Jessica died.”

And that’s - that’s uncalled for. Everything in Sam pulls taut, and he stands, not thinking. The dangerous part of himself that he’s been trying to suppress unfurls in his stomach. Churning hot up and out his throat. 

Sam growls and pushes him out of his space, Dean tripping back, a hand outstretched on the top of the television so he doesn’t hit the floor. The motel notepad falls to the carpet, pen skidding under the bed. 

Dean doesn’t apologise, stands back up to his full height. “It’s like you want to fight. You’ve been looking for one all day.” 

That’s not entirely untrue, Sam just hadn’t realised the full extent of it until he saw it reflected in Eric Hansen this afternoon. 

“For once in your fucking life, mind your own business.” 

“You’re my little brother, Sam. Your business _is_ my business.” Dean sneers, looks like he’s about to add something else, but Sam punches him in the mouth before he can run it any further. 

Dean goes toppling sideways, catches himself with an elbow on the bench. Looks at Sam startled, like he hadn’t expected him to go that far. Dean wipes his mouth on his wrist, bloodied from where his teeth cut unto his lip, smears red from corner to corner, up the side of his cheek.

Sam breathes heavily, his knuckles stinging from where they’d connected with his brother’s face. His body sings, the energy he’d been keeping suppressed exploding out in violence. It feels euphoric. He needs to do it again. 

He pulls Dean up by his collar, his eyes scanning Sam’s face frantically, breathing short and warm over the fist Sam has in his shirt. His brother says softly, “You had a nightmare last night.” 

Sam flinches badly. Lets Dean go like he’s been burnt. “No.”

“You did, you fucking did!” Dean exclaims, grabbing onto Sam’s shoulders and shaking him like he’s got Sam all worked out. 

Sam throws him away but Dean expects it this time, grabbing onto Sam’s wrist with bruising fingers, pulls Sam back into his space. 

There’s nowhere to run. Sam can’t breathe, he struggles in Dean’s grip, pushing at his chest in distress. He can’t be this close. Sam’s made of kerosene and his brother is an open flame. He can see the burning behind the green of his eyes. 

“That’s why you’ve been so -” Dean trails off, laughs humorlessly, putting the puzzle pieces together. 

“Dean you have to let me go,” Sam pleads, his voice coming out weaker than intended. He’s not liable for whatever happens next. This isn’t his fault. Sam had warned him. 

“What did you see, Sammy?” 

In response, Sam leans down and kisses him on the mouth. 

He expects Dean to retaliate, draw back and take a swing at Sam for this. He needs Dean to fight, needs a reason to use up all this tormentous spark. He’s kissed his brother. It’s the last straw, the final line crossed.

Dean kisses him back, is the worst part of it all. He lets Sam’s wrist go, slides his hand around the back of Sam’s neck, pulling him down. He tastes of blood from where Sam had hit him, but it’s subdued behind what is distinctively Dean. He’s not in the right mind to analyse that. 

Sam growls into his mouth. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It wasn’t supposed to happen at all. His brother drew it out of him and now nothing will be the way it was before. He shoves at Dean’s chest, hard enough to break their mouths apart but Dean has a vice grip around his neck. Sam backs him into the wall instead, puts his entire body weight behind the shove. 

Dean’s head hits the wallpaper hard enough to bounce, he groans at the pain of it and the sound burns hot in Sam’s lower belly. He needs to pull more of those noises from Dean, drawn from pain or the complete opposite, Sam’s not fussy. He opens his mouth on Dean’s throat. 

“Sam -” Dean starts, cut off when Sam uses his teeth at the base of his neck. His brother exhales shakily, fisting a hand at the back of Sam’s head, tugging at his hair - not to pull Sam off, but to encourage. 

His hands push at Dean’s hips, slide up under his brother’s shirt. His skin is hot, his flesh and blood brother under his palms. He’s imagined this, pressing Dean into bedroom doors in every house they’ve ever lived, but he’d only had so much material to work with and he’s never been able to grab at his brother’s waist with such overt intent. 

Sam wants to savour it, take his time. Push Dean against the bed and figure out if his years of boasting about bedroom talents were justified. Sam wants to spend a whole week kissing him; the entirety of him. Relearn Dean’s body to find all the similarities that make them brothers.

He doesn’t have the control for that at the moment, he’s desperate and scrambling, selfishly wanting to take. They’re free falling and there’s only jagged rocks at the bottom. There’ll be nothing but disaster tomorrow, whatever Sam does to Dean tonight. 

Dean has a hand on Sam’s lower back, fingers pushing hard into the muscle, uses it to press their hips together. His brother makes a low noise in his throat that Sam can feel under his lips with his head tipped back. He’s hard in his jeans and Sam grinds against him, biting red blotchy marks under the collar of Dean’s shirt, one long condemning line of bruises up the side of his neck. 

“Do you have any idea?” Sam asks, muffled against Dean’s skin. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Any idea how deep Dean has his hooks in him? How much he wants to throw him to the ground and break his ribs? How much he wants to force his face into the mattress and fuck him senseless? How much he loves him? How much Sam hates himself for all of the above? 

“No - yes, yes,” Dean says shakily, snaking a hand between their bodies to pop the button of Sam’s jeans, thumbing down the fly. “Sammy.”

Sam feels like he’s going to combust, his brother presses his palm against where he’s straining against his briefs, pushing his cock up against his belly. Everything in him refocuses to the surging heat in his gut. Dean is touching him, that’s Dean’s hand pushing down his elastic, that’s Dean’s ring cool against the sensitive skin of his dick. 

Dean goes to his knees abruptly, one hand around the base of Sam, the other steady against Sam’s hip and Sam has to brace himself against the wall because Dean looks up at him with that mouth that Sam’s dreamt for the better part of his life. Already obscene lips, now swollen from the hit, blood crusted on his cheek. 

Dean licks a huge stripe up the underside of Sam’s cock, and Sam has the resounding realisation that Dean has done this before. Dean on the piss-stained floor of bar bathrooms, getting his mouth fucked by strangers. The imagery is filthy but his brother sucks at the head of Sam’s dick and all thoughts but the present are obliterated. 

Dean doesn’t work up to it, he takes him down fully, like he knows Sam can’t wait. Dean fists his hands in the material of Sam’s pants and pulls him forward, begging him to move. 

“Fuck, fuck.” Sam scrambles to find purchase in Dean’s short hair, doing what he’s told, grinding his hips forward, forcing himself into Dean’s mouth.

The air feels like it’s been punched out of him, Dean’s tongue going flat to make space for him, there’s no teeth, Dean’s too good at this to forget about watching his teeth. There’s nowhere for him to go, his head backed up against the wall, Sam curved over the top of him. Dean’s hands shake at his hips and he breathes in harsh pants around him, and then not at all when Sam thrusts forward, his nose buried against his lower belly, squashed in the hair at the base of his dick. 

Sam holds himself there, feeling Dean trying to breathe around him, his throat contracting, trying not to choke or gag. Dean glances up at him, his eyes huge and wet, waiting for Sam to move again. 

Dean is letting him do what he wants, Sam realises madly. He thinks of long-grassed backyard spars, chasing Dean down dirt back roads, watching the dust cling to the sweat of his brothers back. Dean goading him into burning up his frustration, letting Sam take it out on him. Sam thinks of a younger Dean, knees bent and fists up to protect his face, ‘C’ _mon, Sammy dish it out’._

This is Dean looking after him. 

Dean shuffles on his knees, impatient. He’s got his own jeans open, a hand shoved down to stroke at himself, wriggling, and making desperate, whimpered sounds with every exhale. Sam pulls back and obliges him, sets a pace that has Dean squeezing his eyes shut.

He’d be embarrassed about how quickly Dean has worked him up, but his brother has always known how to get under his skin; exactly all the right buttons to push and when to push them. Why wouldn’t he know how to play Sam like this just the same? 

His brother coughs violently when Sam pulls out of his mouth, goes to turn to the side in case he throws up, but Sam yanks him back by his hair, holds him front and centre while he finishes himself off over Dean’s face. Adds to the blood dribbling a diluted red down his chin, eye’s red and half-lidded, cheeks wet with involuntary tears. Dean winces, lets it happen.

Sam releases Dean and stumbles backwards to sit on the edge of the bed for support. His legs unsteady and whole body shaking in turns. His breathing exaggerated and loud as he comes down from the adrenaline high. He feels sick, the glow immediately gone with the expended energy. Sam watches in horror as his brother wipes the mess on his face on the collar of his shirt and gets slowly off his knees. 

“Dean,” Sam tries to explain as Dean crosses the gap between them. Sam needs to apologise. He needs to get on his knees and beg Dean not to leave him for this. He needs to promise it’ll never happen again, make up some kind of excuse that this wasn’t him. _It’s the case, Dean. You know I would never._

“It’s ok, Sammy,” Dean whispers, his voice rough and ruined. Dean leans down to kiss him, one small promise, before rearing back and knocking Sam out with a cataclysmic punch to the side of his face. 

\---

Overnight, Alison Davies dies. 

Not yet eighteen with fingers painted in chipped fluro pink. Band posters and polaroids of a life lived overlapping on her bedroom wall. A world map with a spread of colourful glass pins; tiny holes in the future. 

Her body has been removed by the time they arrive at the family house but the blood in the bathroom turns the grout between the tiles red, a macabre kind of grid. B3 is where Alison swallowed the entire medicine cabinet, E5 is where she cut lines over her wrists for posterity.

The bathroom smells of bleach where they’ve done a haphazard job of scrubbing the mess away, and Sam’s skull splits open from where Dean had knocked him out last night. Sam waits in the hallway and gets into a staring contest with a younger version of Alison in a framed photo on the wall, her arms outstretched atop the country’s smallest mountain. 

The police don’t look surprised. The disparity between crimes of murder and suicide in backwash towns is heavily tipped towards the latter and Sam wagers that this is not the first time anyone on scene has dealt with the cleanup. There’s nothing further for the locals to investigate, as far as they know it was premeditated and self-inflicted. Paperwork and funeral preparation the toughest part of the job.

Sam can see Dean down the hallway, glancing at Sam every so on, checking he hasn’t had a complete emotional meltdown and bolted, or whatever. Sam’s not quite at that stage yet. It’s a close thing, though.

He’s been side eye-ing Sam all morning. As soon as they got the call out, Sam watched Dean speak with the Sheriff from bed, eating the thick-cut fruit toast Dean had left to get him while he was sleeping off his minor head trauma. 

The punch was warranted and Sam is in a way grateful for it - being forced into unconscious and unable to fuck things up even more than he already had. Dean had done what was best for them both. He has the beginnings of what will be a dark black eye, his cheek split where Dean’s ring had broken the skin, blossoming out pink and blues. Sam had deserved to be knocked out, but Dean could have at least used his left. 

Today, Sam still wants to put his hands around his brother's throat and squeeze, but the edge has been taken off with the prophecy fulfilled. Dean knows Sam wants him, and in exactly what kind of debauched way. The anger the curse is meant to channel is subdued behind by thick, cloying guilt and shame. They’re not talking about it. 

Sam’s going three kinds of crazy over analysing it, though. He taps a rhythm into the wallpaper behind his back and replays Dean kissing him behind his eyes. Because he had, in fact, kissed him. Sam had started it. Dean had been the one to end it. Dean has always been good at fixing Sam’s messes. 

Dean had told him it was okay, forgiven him with something sweet to contemplate, to turn over until it dissolves and loses all flavour, the meaning left obvious on his tongue. The issue is that Sam doesn’t know what part of last night he’s been pardoned of. It was a multifaceted fight, (are they calling it that?) Sam’s issues with himself all woven and twisted into a violent thing. Is he being excused of throwing the first punch? Kissing Dean? Forcing his dick down his brother’s throat? Not giving Dean a helping hand? 

Sam pushes off the wall and falls in line beside Dean when he leaves the bathroom, walking back down the hallway. Dean wipes a hand over his mouth in the way he does when he’s overwhelmed, and it throws Sam back to last night with Dean on his knees. Sam has condemned himself to never being able to look at his brother’s mouth the same. 

“She spent the last few days at home. Picked up the groceries her father asked her to grab on the way back from the bus stop two days ago. They got in a fight about it.” Dean looks at Sam pointedly. 

“Did she dream?” 

“Dunno.” 

The flywire squeaks as they exit the house, slamming closed behind them. It’s overcast, trapping the heat from yesterday under clouds, making the air muggy and unpleasant. Dean looks uncomfortable in his jacket, but has to keep his collar popped to cover the marks Sam lined down his neck. Sam caught a glimpse of them in the motel and felt like he’d been dropped five storeys, stomach swooping. Sam had done that, Sam had put those there with his mouth. 

He clears his throat, has his hand on the car door handle when he spots it. The white cat sitting pleasantly under atop the rusted out car parked in the corner of the front yard, grass high around flat tires, twisted in the wheels. 

Sam pauses, watching it watch him. It’s been at both crime scenes, as though it’s invested in the outcome. It had looked on as Sam shoved Dean in the alley. 

Sam had petted it their first day here, at the Dougherty’s. Scratched his fingers under its chin and woke up sweating from the nightmare that night. 

“Does the grocery store have video footage?” Sam asks, not taking his eyes off the animal. It doesn’t move, just sits and stares with its all-seeing blue eyes. 

“Probably, why?” 

“Maybe she talked to someone... touched something.”

Dean doesn’t reply immediately, Sam hears the jangle of keys but not the sound of Dean getting in the car. He pulls his attention away from the cat to check on his brother. 

Dean’s looking at him, that same concerned frown that seems perpetually stuck to his forehead this week. He pulls open the car door and glances elsewhere when Sam meets his eyes. “She didn’t really seem like the suicidal type.”

“Why? Because she wanted to see the world? People can have hope for the future and still want to die, Dean.”

His brother spares him a sad glance, running his tongue over the cut on the inside of his lip, clears his throat and gets in the car. 

Sam thinks of Dean in front of the microfiche an age ago, tiny text thrown back over his face. Suicide written on his cheek. Sam doesn’t think Dean would consider it, consciously. Even if Sam were gone. Mr Guns and Glory, out with a bang. If anything, he’d slip up on a case, undercompensate without Sam there to watch his back, go down and perhaps not fight so hard to regain the lost ground. 

Sam thinks he has the constitution for it, himself. If it was for the greater good. If it meant the safety of others. Go somewhere liminal, out in a field with tall grass to cloak the act. Lay in the dirt and let himself bleed out, the earth soaking him up, to be put to better use. Sam thinks he could do that. Take care of that demon blood, on his own terms, play out his father’s dying wish. 

If he were dead then he wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of last night. Fade out with his last thoughts of Dean and his lips and his breath over Sam’s face when he had bent down to kiss him on the bed. 

Sam shakes his head, he’s not thinking about it seriously. It’s just a mindset that he’s lived with for as long as he can remember. A bright flash in the background of his subconscious that reminds him it’s there every so often, like the bounce of midday sun off a rear view mirror as it passes, or a watch face at the right angle. 

But Sam can understand how the curse could force something like that. How it toys with what is already present, builds and exaggerates, a helping hand off the side of a cliff. 

“You ok?” Dean asks, and it seems like such a ridiculous thing to say. He forced himself on his brother last night and they’re not talking about it because Dean is Dean and Sam is a coward and there's no use when Sam’s still under the curse anyway, blanketed with the very strong likelihood he’ll snap again, doesn’t need the prodding. Dean’s asking if he’s okay, like Sam would have an answer for that anyway. Narrowed down it means, _I don’t have to hide the knives, do I?_

Sam doesn’t answer. 

\---

Staffied grocery store is a four aisle wide, family run affair. Fresh fruit and vegetables from local farmers, _we only outsource our strawberries you see? Soil ain’t good_ _for that here_ and Sam thinks maybe if you cut back on the acres of canola, it grows like a weed. 

They flash their badges, and the owner takes them out back, where boxes of stock sit piled like sky-scrapers to the roof, precariously angled over a dusty computer sat in its designated corner, playing fuzzy, green-tinged footage of the both entrances and register. The industrial sized air conditioner roars above their heads. 

He knows what they’re looking for before they really have to ask. The owner, around the same age as Alison’s father, has heard about the news, remembers the time she arrived and the exact quantity of small, weighed bag of baby spinach she’d left with. 

He blows the keyboard clean of dust, sending a plume up and into their faces. Dean recoils, sneezes, rubs his eyes. 

“Sorry, I never have to check these, we don’t get much crime in Staffield. God, she was so young,” he says as the blurry spearmint video of an alive Alison enters the store from two days ago. 

They watch in silence as time passes and Alison collects what she needs. 

“Did she seem strange at all when you spoke to her?” Dean asks as Sam watches the screen, flipping between cameras to check the storefront. 

“No, not particularly,” the man says, leaning over the desk to compile some of the spread out documents so Sam can get at the mouse. “I mean maybe, it’s kind of silly… She didn’t wish me good afternoon. I thought it kind of rude at the time, but I assumed she was just having a bad day. Alison is -” he clears his throat, corrects his tenses. “She was a polite girl, well liked.” 

“Here,” Sam says, hitting space on the keyboard, pausing the footage to a frame of Alison bending over to pat the cat, loitering around the front of the store. Sam points. 

Dean leans in to inspect the screen closer, his face close beside Sam’s. Sam doesn’t dare breathe. 

“The cat?” 

“Bloody pest that one. Gets anything it wants because it's so doll-like. People been feeding it, letting it into their houses and whatnot ever since Mrs Guthrie passed.” 

“So it was definitely hers?” 

The man nods. “That cat loved her. Only one that did. Creepy old woman.” 

The counter bell rings from behind the plastic curtain and the owner excuses himself, trusts them not to steal his dozens of slabs of sarsaparilla. 

Sam stands, runs a hand through his hair. 

“I pet that cat, Dean. It was hanging around the area, Eric Hansen must have too.”

“What are you thinking?” Dean asks, watching Sam pace in the cramped space. 

“Maybe she put a spell on it before she died? Revenge for all the rumours?” 

“We checked the house, there was nothing witchy about it, remember?” 

Sam frowns, he hadn't felt anything off about it either. Besides the oppressing weight of a hundred different versions of Christ and co. watching from paintings and paraphernalia. “We must have missed something.” 

Sam chances a look at Dean, ready for him to complain again about witches or having to reinvestigate somewhere they’d already spent time but he’s smiling at Sam, a small and soft thing.

“Homestretch, Sammy,” Dean says, and hope worms its way into Sam’s heart. 

\---

The wind picks up on the way back out of town, grey clouds overhead, the world trying to flip that switch in Sam again, oppress his mood, send him spiraling.

It doesn’t work, Dean’s driving fast and Sam’s got the window down so he doesn’t have to think, the air rushing by deafening. The promise of rain cuts through the ever present, strong smell of canola. 

Dean knows better than to say anything about the noise, choosing his words carefully and not touching Sam so carelessly today. It’s a shame Sam won’t have a chance to see how far Dean’s courtesy stretches. If Sam’s cat lead proves fruitful, the curse will be lifted and they’ll both go back to their usual selves. Dean, just as frustrating as he’s ever been, and Sam, a master of drowning most of it out.

Sam prays that’s all still possible. 

He gets the gate, and Dean waits for him this time, the rumbling of the Impala mixing with the low rolling growl of thunder overhead. 

Sam waits at the bottom of the stairs, scanning the property while Dean is crouched, repicking the lock to check the main house again. His head turned to the side, with one eye closed and tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth. 

“I’m gonna go check the sheds.” 

Dean makes a satisfied noise as the lock clicks and the door creaks open. He turns to Sam from the patio, tucking his tools back into the inner pocket of his jacket. “Sure.” And then after a delay, “Be careful.” 

There’s a building to the left of the main house, all corrugated iron, wooden planks laid over the roof, and covered by green tarp that dips with pools of trapped rainwater. Sam pulls his gun from the back of his pants, to be safe. 

It’s mostly gardening equipment, and all of it looks as though it hasn’t been used in years, tossed undercover and forgotten about. Besides a few repurposed condiment jars full of dead herbs, a half-decomposed dead rat, and the usual amount of cockroaches, it's delightfully witch-free. 

The larger barn that sits against the canola fields is unsuspicious too. It smells like damp hay and rotting wood, rusted harvesting tools lined up in place against the walls. Sam walks the rest of the property, watching his footing in the years-long unmaintained grass. There’s statues out here too, hidden amongst the weeds. Concrete angels, moss covered, a two tiered fountain with a thick layer of algae over the surface of the stagnant water. It’s all a little unsettling, but in an abandoned, forgotten kind of way, nothing to do with the supernatural. 

Sam follows the side of the house and around the back to where the yard flows down the hill and overlooks the fields. It’s a breathtaking display of contrast. The sky is so dark, clouds rolling over each other with the weather, the blacks and blues exaggerated by the blinding yellow of the forever stretch of canola. So bright it's as though it's glowing, like the sun is somehow shining on the fields and the fields alone, despite being hidden behind the clouds. Sam can see the wind catch it, the yellow rippling in waves.

There’s something at the bottom of the hill, nestled into the grass at the edge of the property where the twisted wire fence separates the fields.

Two pieces of wood nailed together into a crucifix, hammered into the dirt. A grave.

Sam calls his brother’s name, loud so it echoes all the way up to the house, out through the acres. 

The grass hasn’t sprung back completely where it had been dug, two - maybe three weeks of growth, the soil is still loose. 

“Sam?” Dean calls from the top of the hill, the backdoor of the house slamming open. 

“Down here.” 

The grass whispers as his brother jogs, his boots loud against the ground. Dean whistles low, when he comes into line of sight. “Jackpot, Sammy.” 

“I was thinking it was the husband, but he has a plot in the cemetery a town over and we saw Mrs Guthrie at the morgue.” 

Dean hums, crouches to poke at the dirt. “The plot is too small to be human.” 

“What if it’s the cat,” Sam says, carefully. 

Dean doesn’t laugh at Sam’s suggestion, taking this as seriously as Sam. If it wasn’t Sam’s mental health on the line, Sam wonders if Dean might have. It is a little ridiculous, afterall. Dean says, “Like a Pet Sematary situation? Church wannabe?” 

“I don’t know.” It hadn’t felt strange when Sam had pet it the other day. Sam remembers it was soft, but he can’t remember if it was warm. “I think we should dig it up,” Sam says, standing back up to look at the house, its two stories towering from this angle. 

“Sure, why not.” 

Dean fetches the shovel from the trunk, and Sam jumps at the thunder overhead, feels uneasily alone, his mood tumultuous. Guilt from last night returning without distraction. He rubs his arms, not cold, but pricking with goosebumps nevertheless. It’ll be over soon, Sam thinks. It’ll be over soon and it’ll be the start of something new. 

His brother returns as the sky begins to open, huge, heavy raindrops through his hair. Sam watches him raise the shovel above his head triumptly at the top of the hill, not phased by the turn of weather. 

Sam digs up the grass, wanting to put his mind to something, to feel the physical burn in his shoulders so he doesn’t worry himself sick with uncertainty. Dean kissed him back, _shovel_ , Dean said it’s okay, _shovel_ , Dean smiled at him in the grocery store, _shovel_ , Dean isn’t acting all that freaked, _thunk_. 

Dean crouches to peel back the shoebox lid as Sam spears the earth with the blade, peels his jacket off his shoulders, the rain making everything humid. His shirt darkens with rain, bleeding through the fabric and cooling his skin. Dean’s hair sticks to his forehead, the product all run out. 

The body is wrapped in a tea-towel, not long enough in the ground to have broken down yet. Dean pulls it back like he had the sheet over Ethel Guthrie’s corpse in the morgue. Her cat sits tucked in the box, its fur dusted with grave dirt. The silver crucifix sits nestled in the fur on its back, removed from the collar. 

“That’s interesting,” Dean says, standing, tilting his head to the side to consider the situation. “It’s the same cat right?”

“Yeah, I remember that.” Sam points to the charm. “So much for pesantas.” 

“Yeah well… I was missing some pretty crucial information at the time,” Dean says, the first broach of last night.

Sam stumbles over his line of thought. Takes a second to reply. “Vengeful spirit? You think it was angry over how the town spoke about Mrs Guthrie?”

“Cats _are_ little assholes, but I dunno if I buy that they’re intelligent enough for murder. Maybe she was a witch and put a spell on the collar before she died.”

Sam thinks about how the cat had looked at him. How it had studied him with its blue-saucer eyes, as if it was egging him on; loitered at the crime scenes to watch the results of its own handiwork. 

He thinks about the forced perspective behind the dreams, the billboard and the church, framed guilt, biblical sin. That had to come from somewhere, and it was no coincidence both him and Eric Hansen had seen their resentment spelled out like words from God’s own mouth. Sam would put money on Alison Davies having seen one of her own, probably even more townsfolk - anyone that had been lured in by the cat’s glamour. Pretty and poised and the furthest thing from pure. 

“Burning both will solve it either way.”

Dean grins wickedly, shaking a bottle of lighter fluid out between them, rain running spaghetti-lines down his leather, over his temples. “Wanna do the honours?”

Sam douses the grave with more than usual to combat the rain, catches the box of matches when Dean throws it over the body, fingers slipping, wet as he strikes, keeping a hand cupped over the flame so it can take. 

The small grave goes up orange, burns so well Sam has to turn his eyes away from the bright, the smoke wafting up and up and adding to the clouds in the sky. 

Sam feels better incrementally as the fire nibbles away at the body. His chest loosens, a knot unraveling from behind his ribs. He feels light, like a weight has been taken from where he hadn’t even realised he’d been carrying it, like he’s being slowly dropped back into himself. Realigned, Sam breathes deep for the first time in days. 

He sees the cat behind the fence, sitting at the foot of the canola stalks, watching it’s body go up in flames, flickering in and out of existence. Dean must see it too, because he walks over to stand next to Sam, a hand on Sam’s elbow.

“How do you feel?” 

Sam turns to face his brother and it’s like all the serotonin the curse was holding from him hits at once. Something bubbles up in his chest, like laughter or love, and he grins, his cheeks hurt. Dean looks relieved, his whole body relaxing in a sigh. 

“Dean -” 

“You don’t have to apologise, Sam.” 

“But -” 

“It’s okay.” 

“How can anything about -” Sam tries again, but Dean’s rearranging his grip on Sam’s elbow, locking his fingers around Sam’s wrist, yanks him forward so that he’s in Dean’s space.

“I’m telling you, it’s okay,” his brother says over the rain, his free hand over his neck, thumb at the pulse point, looks at Sam waiting, giving Sam agency over the situation, checking it’s something that Sam still wants. Like perhaps Sam’s monstrous love for his brother was just a symptom of the curse.

Sam kisses him. 

Of course Sam kisses him. 

\---

The billboard today reads, _“‘HATRED STIRS UP STRIFE, BUT LOVE COVERS ALL OFFENSES. PROVERBS’ 10:12”_

**Author's Note:**

> The [world's smallest mountain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Wycheproof) is located next door to the place I grew up in country Australia. It's incredibly underwhelming, but they have the best sandwiches, and the best name for a town. 
> 
> I feel so incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Frauke, I had to keep pinching myself to check it was real. Please check out her other SPN work, everything she touches is gold. 
> 
> Twitter: [@cowboywincest](https://twitter.com/cowboywincest) and [@tgtbata](https://twitter.com/tgtbata)
> 
> Tumblr: [cowboywincest](https://cowboywincest.tumblr.com/) and  
> [thegoodthebadandtheart](https://thegoodthebadandtheart.tumblr.com/)


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